The current South Korea national badminton team could be their strongest ever. They have a top-five player in every category except men’s singles and took three out of the possible five titles in the 2023 BWF World Championships.
Today, we’re going to take a look at Korea’s badminton men’s doubles pair, Kang Min-Hyuk and Seo Seung Jae. These two are currently ranked number four in the world and are your reigning world champions.
What makes them so good? Well, we’re going to discuss that in today’s video as well as the weaknesses that have prevented them from winning tournaments such as the Olympics.
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Compared to other top pro doubles pairs, Kang and Seo play noticeably more of a “control style” as far as control goes for doubles.
What you’ll notice is that they’re very good at playing toward each other. Every shot is played in anticipation of the next shot with the goal of getting a 100% winner as opposed to gambling off their skills.
You can see this from the Koreans’ shot choices. They rarely ever put full power into a shot or jump for brushes at the net unless they have a near-guarantee chance of killing the rally.
Instead, most of their shots are about placement and playing at a speed that allows them to smoothly rotate. Take these rallies for example.
You can see here that Seo isn’t using his full power and is instead, targeting his opponent’s hip. This location is very hard to defend against and often leads to easy kills or opportunities to continue pressuring for Kang.
It’s not just Seo setting up for Kang either. The same goes the other way around where Kang often places drives and blocks in positions where the most likely return is easy for Seo to deal with.
Additionally, it’s important to note that Kang is right-handed while Seo is left-handed. This allows them to play unique combos that use a lot of cross shots.
Typically, cross shots are very dangerous in doubles when you and your partner have the same dominant hand. For example, if you hit a cross from your forehand, the straight return can often lead your partner to use a backhand and force your team into a defensive position.
With Kang and Seo, however, a straight return in response to a forehand cross court shot generally ends up in one of the two’s forehands. We can see multiple instances of Kang and Seo using this lefty-righty combo well and making it difficult for their opponents to play against.
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What also originally stood out to us was that Kang and Seo looked like the best all-around doubles players currently. Yes, Kang may be a little inconsistent, but it’s balanced out by Seo’s high badminton IQ and ability to see angles.
The pair as a whole has good smashes, good drives, good defense, good rotation, good shot selection, and overall don’t have any major flaws or weaknesses. Which made us wonder, how do the Koreans ever lose games?
Well, upon watching hours of their gameplay, we realized that good was not good enough at the top pro level.
The Koreans were good all around, but they weren’t dangerous.
Kang just isn’t as fast and does not have insane net play compared to some other front players nor did Seo have explosive monster smashes that other backcourt players have.
What we noticed in Kang and Seo’s gameplay is that they generally lose when their opponents are able to break their rotation rhythm.
This is usually done from their opponents playing faster than Kang Seo’s usual rhythm coupled with using deceptions that take them out of their comfort zone.
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Fortunately for Kang and Seo, there is no doubles pair currently that can play like this consistently which is why men’s doubles is a complete toss-up at the high levels where everyone can beat everyone and the better pair is just the better pair on that day.
Personally, if I were Kang and Seo, I would work on really trying to sharpen one element of our game and try to play around that. The pair needs to go from good all around to being dangerous.
You can think of this concept like in video games where you max out certain skills and stats first instead of trying to level up everything at the same time.
For Kang and Seo, the skill that comes to mind is defense. Their defense is already superb, but if they can get their consistency to the level where opponents need to play 15–20 shots every rally and pull out every card they have to get a single point, then they’ll be unstoppable.
Of course, they can also work on attack or other skills, but putting focus on one thing would help them develop the danger element that they’re currently missing.
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